Off the Beat 4: The ivy and the weeds

On a hill overlooking East Cleveland, there is a building that was designed to look out at the universe forever. 

The Warner & Swasey Observatory opened in the 1920s, and for decades, astronomers and people who study the universe walked through that building and climbed its spiral staircases, trying to answer questions so big that they existed on the fringes and borders of where science ends and faith and philosophy begin. What is out there? If anything … How far does it go? What came before us, and what will exist after? 

The Warner & Swasey company made tools and precision instruments. Their products were used during both World War I and World War II, and, among other tools, they also built telescopes. The telescopes that would become significant tools of discovery for institutions like the U.S. Naval Observatory and the University of California’s Lick Observatory, which at the time was home to the largest refracting telescope ever made. 

Eventually, Worcester Reed Warner and Ambrose Swasey, the founders of the company, became trustees of Case Western Reserve’s Institute of Technology, and they built the Warner and Swasey Observatory, which helped pioneer groundbreaking research, including proving that the Milky Way was a spiral galaxy and that red giants, which are giant stars towards the end of their lifespan, exist primarily in the center of our galaxy. 

Today, it is full of graffiti, and not even the poetic, beautiful kind of graffiti, which I adore. The lousy kind. The kind you’d find inside a stall of a Speedway restroom, next to a phone number you can call for a “good time.”  

It smells like mold, windows are broken, and bricks and chunks of rubble scatter the floor like toys in a child’s bedroom. This building, which was just as much a church that anyone goes to to seek knowledge and wisdom, has become just a shell, covered in the crumbling remains of itself.

As I wandered through the building, climbing the old spiral staircases and halls where legitimate scientific knowledge was discovered, I got to the top of the building, where I saw that in the dome that housed telescopes powerful enough to reveal the contours of our galaxy, there is now  nothing but signs of neglect. 

Broken glass … Debris … Nature, slowly reclaiming what every building that housed science and discovery was built to defy. That building was built to study an infinite universe, and all of its mysteries, and now it’s become curdled milk past its expiration date. 

A great deal of our lives are spent pretending that permanence exists. We get caught up in the idea of “legacy” and “what we leave behind” because that’s our best chance at a second life, let alone an eternal one. We create buildings, songs, books, films, even children, hoping that some part of us will exist after we cease to. 

But everything has an expiration date.

One day, no one will remember your name. The house you lived in will be occupied by someone who didn’t even know you existed. Then, it will be torn down and rebuilt into something else, (probably a data center.) Entire cities have disappeared. Civilizations, their languages, and their music that once filled the streets and their booming cultures just vanished. It will certainly happen to us someday too. There will come a day when no one will ever hear Beethoven’s music again.

Not because people won’t want to hear it, but because time and nature will reclaim it and cover it in the same weeds and ivy that the Warner and Swasey observatory is covered in. Entropy will come for the stars it was built to study too.

I climbed to the top of one of the domes and looked out over a city that existed in the same way the observatory did and I can see the weeds. A storm was rolling in from the west. Dark clouds pushed slowly across the sky and for a few minutes I just stood there and watched them.

Then I started making my way back down.

I descended down the spiral staircase of a building that has stood for more than a century and watched Cleveland grow around it until the light it illuminated rendered the structure obsolete. 

As I was leaving, I saw a pathway near the front that opened up into complete blackness. The darkest black I had ever seen. I couldn’t tell if there was anything in there, or, if there wasn’t. It felt like an infinite darkness, a darkness that reminds you that all you are is light bouncing off of something. I started feeling as if I wasn’t alone. On another day, I would have continued in there, because there’s always been a part of me that wants to stand on the other side of that blackness. But not today, I wanted to beat the rain.

I walked out of the Warner and Swasey observatory. Outside, the storm was closer now. The wind had picked up as I walked a block or so away to where my car was sitting and as I got in, I turned and looked back at the old observatory and I saw a woman in a red t-shirt standing in the exact same spot I stood inside that dome at the top of the building staring back at me. 

We were too far away to say anything to each other, but we just stood there for a couple of seconds just staring at one another before she slowly turned her back and walked out of sight and disappeared.

I waited for her to come back into view.

She never did.

Maybe she lived nearby. Maybe she was someone who just wanted to see the inside of the observatory as I did. Or, maybe… I avoided the weeds and ivy one more day.

Either way, I got into my car before the storm arrived, and I beat the rain.